Are we in a bubble? Far too late to be asking that question, says Chris Nolan, a former Valley newspaper gossip who now runs a startup, Spot-On. She weighs in on the current market crisis and its effects on the tech business. Her thesis: New regulations will on investment banks will bring an end to the tech-stock bubbles on which Valley VCs have feasted. (I asked if this meant she was back in the tech-gossip game; Nolan's column served as one of this website's inspirations. "I'm writing about business and politics," she demurred.) Nolan compares sketchy mortgages approved by banks to the wafer-thin startups taken public by stockbrokers a decade ago. A brief version of her 887-word argument, followed by my take on where Nolan goes wrong:

Is Andy Ihnatko Fake Steve Jobs? Valleywag was the first to name him publicly as a candidate for writing the faux diary of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, but now Ihnatko is being fingered again, thanks to a needlessly elaborate Internet sting. Could the longtime Mac columnist be the man behind the curtain?

PaidContent.org founder Rafat Ali threw an NYC media party last night to celebrate his blog's first investment round. The "guys in nametags making pitches" reminded media pundit Jeff Jarvis of the bashes of the dot-com boom. The Gawker Media overlords were bouncing biz-dev people back and forth like Web 2.0 ping-pong. "All the hookups had the blandness of lesbian sex," said one attendee. "Nobody has any money, so there's no penetration."

We had a little joke a couple of weeks ago about San Francisco gossip columnists writing pieces on Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig's List. So I nearly spewed my 10 AM martini all over my laptop when I saw this line in an article about Richard Riordan's new paper, the LA Examiner:

Ex-NY Post gossip columnist Chris Nolan writes in: